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Tag Archives: okara

There are special machines for making plant milks at home, but making soy milk without them is quite easy too. All you need is a blender, big pot, colander/sieve and cheesecloth. And soy beans and water of course. Home made soy milk has a strong soy bean flavour, which means it doesn’t taste so good if you drink it, but it’s good for cooking and baking. If you like to drink soy milk, you can add something like sugar and vanilla to make it taste better.

Home made soy milk

200g soy beans
water for soaking
2l water

Soak the soy beans overnight. Drain and rinse well.

Use a blender to make a smooth paste from the beans. Adding a little water makes the blending easier. We have a hand held blender, but other kind of blenders can be used too.

Put 2 liters water into a big pot. 5l pot is good, because the milk easily boils over. Bring the water to boil and add the soy bean paste. Slowly boil 20 minutes (from the point the water starts boiling again after adding the bean paste). At first you have to constantly stir, because there will be lots of foam. You may need to remove the pot from the heat couple of times. The milk settles down in 5 minutes or so, and then you don’t have to stir it all the time. But stir often to avoid burning your milk, even if it doesn’t burn as easily as cow’s milk (if you have made sauces or anything of cow’s milk ever in your life you know how easy it is to burn).

Cover your colander/sieve with cheesecloth and put it above a bowl. Strain your milk mixture with it. Don’t pour everything at once, unless you have a huge bowl! Transfer milk from the bowl into a bottle or other container to make room for more and pour more to the colander.

When it looks like all the milk has dripped to the bowl, lift the cheesecloth like in the picture above to get the rest of the milk out. You can also squeeze it.

The stuff that is left in your cheesecloth is called okara and it can be used for cooking too. Make okara nuggets, for example.